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We've had an amazing success story e-mailed in to us and we couldn't NOT share it with you all.
My name is Tom Middleton, I am 16 and preparing to do my GCSE's this summer.
I am the youngest of 5 children and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes two years ago. I self-inject novorapid when I eat and levemere at night.
This weekend, I did the Tough Guy in Wolverhampton this weekend. It was pretty horrible, underground tunnels with electric shocks if you hit the sides, 30 foot high obstacles to climb over, a 6 mile run through deep mud, wading through trenches with water up to my neck, jumping through fires. It was so cold my body felt like it was shutting down, it took me 3 hours to complete and I don't want to ever do it again.
But my diabetes was not a problem. Other guys were suffering a lot more than me. The medics told me they were getting one person in every minute. They were pulling out mostly with exhaustion; they were frightening to see, shaking and staggering around with a crazy look in their eyes. It wasn't really surprising the weather was freezing, the mud was overwhelming and at one stage we had hail that hurt your skin when it hit you.
I trained a lot with a friend, we had two old baths out in our garden and we filled them with water, got into them, ran for 2 miles, then sat back in them again and then ran another 2 miles. Also I play rugby most weekends and it has taken a while but I am getting better at getting my levels right. I used the Run Sweet site at first for advice but if you are running in a race you can judge exactly what you will need to eat and inject for it, with rugby it’s hard because sometimes it’s a fast game and sometimes it isn’t.
Tough Guy was the same, I didn’t know how much sugar I would need when I started going through the water tunnels for example and I didn’t know how much sugar I would burn from the shivering. I ate a lot of carbs before the start and tested and ate regularly right through. it was difficult to have to force the guys I was running with to wait in the freezing cold, so I had it planed out so that I knew what I would do depending on my level so that I could be fast and didn't need to really think. I stayed at 9 all the way through.
Why did I do it? Because it was fun and a challenge. In some ways it was nothing to do with my diabetes. But when I suggested it to my friends, one said "are you sure you can do it with diabetes" and that sort of pushed me on. I didn't really care what he thought but it made me want to do it to prove to myself that I could dominate diabetes. And it has. It’s not a problem for me anymore, it can't hold me back.
I live in Wiltshire. I am hoping to study engineering at University when I leave school.
